Are You Upset With Trump?

By Walter E. Block and Oded J.K. Faran

Taped to a pole at Harvard University, “Resist F-Elon Trump at Harvard University”.  (By Chad Davis from Minneapolis, United States – Resist F-Elon Trump at Harvard University, CC BY 2.0, Wikipedia)

There are a lot of people now upset with President Donald Trump. They are rioting in the streets in Los Angeles over ICE enforcement actions. Some 12,000 graduates of Harvard have now signed on to an amicus brief defending their school against what they perceive as the devastations of that monster, Trump. Russia and Ukraine remain locked in conflict despite his promise to end that conflagration in a day or so.  Ditto for the Middle East; still no peace there either.

Periodicals such as the New York Times, the Atlantic, HuffPost, the Daily Beast, CNN, MSNBC, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Politico, BuzzFeed and hundreds of others of that leftist ilk are writhing in dismay and undergoing apoplexy at his doings. He has fired hordes of government bureaucrats, none of whom, presumably, are inclined positively in his direction. Bernie Sanders, AOC, Gavin Newsom and the entire Democratic Party are not exactly happy with him. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

But let us pause and consider: What would life be like if Kamala Harris had won the last election?

Harvard, Columbia and other institutions that have become cesspools of ideological conformity would still be free to allow, even encourage, student and outside agitator anti-Semites to harass, pummel and commit assault and battery upon Jewish students. There would continue to be Jewish-free zones on campus, a shameful echo of historical horrors we swore would never return. Hamas supporter tents would mushroom all over the place, transforming centers of learning into propaganda camps. DEI initiatives would still be the order of the day, not to promote genuine diversity of thought, but to ensure that the professoriate would include virtually no conservative or libertarian professors, a kind of intellectual apartheid masquerading as inclusion. If Charles Murray dared to address students, he would be prevented from speaking; he would be vilified, demonstrating that the marketplace of ideas has been replaced by an echo chamber of orthodoxy.

ICE would be quiescent, its enforcement duties abandoned. Instead, thousands, no, millions of immigrants would pour through our southern border unchecked, creating humanitarian crises and overwhelming local communities. A fence there? Fughedaboudit. The very suggestion would be dismissed as xenophobic. None of those government bureaucrats would have been fired. Instead, more would have been hired, expanding the administrative state’s reach into every corner of American life. The IRS would discriminate against organizations of which she disapproved, weaponizing tax policy for political ends. Word salad would be the order of the day, obscuring policy failures behind clouds of meaningless rhetoric. Giggling too, as serious questions about governance would be met with nervous laughter rather than substantive answers.

Now, we don’t say that libertarians such as ourselves can fully support Donald Trump. His tariffs are nothing less than an economic abomination that would make Adam Smith roll over in his grave. In the words of Thomas Sowell, they are “beneath contempt.” These protectionist measures represent a fundamental misunderstanding of how wealth is created through voluntary exchange. (However, from a political point of view, they are far better than bombing such countries as China or Venezuela; economic warfare, however misguided, beats actual warfare). Telling grocers not to raise prices is hardly compatible with free enterprise; it’s the kind of price control that has failed everywhere from ancient Rome to modern Venezuela. Yes, yes, he is flirting with corruption what with airplanes and dinners, but the Biden crime family was guilty of much more extensive influence peddling. And seriously, it’s the Gulf of Mexico, for goodness sakes, of all the hills to die on, renaming a body of water seems particularly trivial.

Ok, he promised to quickly end the Middle Eastern and Ukraine-Russian wars, and at least so far has failed. But at least he tried, which is more than can be said for an administration that might have been content to let these conflicts fester indefinitely. Give the man just a little credit for attempting what career politicians deemed impossible.

As for Harvard, he has never forbidden them anything. He has never come within a million miles of violating their free speech rights, a courtesy they rarely extend to conservative speakers on their own campus. If we can put words into his mouth, he is saying to Harvard, Columbia, and other such institutions: God bless you in your efforts to promote socialism, stamp out any vestiges of ideological diversity, give Jewish students the back of your hand, demand the use of LGBT pronouns, etc., ad nauseam. Just do it on your own dime, of which you have plenty. Harvard’s endowment alone exceeds $50 billion, more than the GDP of many countries. Don’t expect the average taxpayer, many of whom never attended college and are struggling to make ends meet, to any longer subsidize your ideological indoctrination centers. You people are forever mouthing off about taxing the rich and redistributing wealth. Well, under my administration, the chickens have finally come back to roost on that score with regard to your massive endowment. Tax exemptions are a privilege, not a right, under our present system. They are based on promoting the public good, not the private good of wokesters who have transformed education into activism.

The irony is delicious: Those who champion progressive taxation and wealth redistribution suddenly discover the virtues of tax exemptions when their own ox is being gored. Perhaps this will serve as a valuable lesson in the consequences of the policies they so eagerly advocate for others.